Wide World of Sports - Show News, Reviews, Recaps and Photos - TV.com Wide World of Sports EDIT One of the most important shows in American television, Wide World of Sports (or ABC's Wide World of Sports) was a long-running sports anthology program that established the then third-place network as the leader in U.S. sports programming, and made its producer, Roone Arledge, a major figure in American television. WWOS was a ninety-minute affair every Saturday afternoon that presented filmed highlights from various sporting competitions. The opening narration told viewers it would be "spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport", and it delivered on that promise by presenting such events as Irish Hurling, Surfing from Hawaii, cliff diving from Acapulco, and fishing tournaments from South America. The show occasionally featured offbeat sports like barrel jumping and arm wrestling, which with the correct editing, made for compelling viewing. In addition to covering the event, the show would do a background feature on one of the main competitors, a concept that was a forerunner of the "up close and personal" stories Arledge made famous on ABC's Olympic coverage.

WWOS's bread and butter were auto racing (particularly NASCAR events and the Grand Prix of Monaco); U.S. and world championships in gymnastics, track and field, and ice skating; and boxing. WWOS would show the tape of a major bout (usually the first free TV airing), with the winner being interviewed by the network's boxing commentator, Howard Cosell. Cosell's frequent interviews with heavyweight champion Muhammed Ali became both famous and controversial (because Cosell defended Ali's right to express himself, even if he sometimes disagreed with what Ali said). Ali made over 60 appearances on the show, the most for any athlete. As satelite broadcasting became commonplace, and cable channels proliferated, the concept of an anthology show presenting taped highlights of sporting events (no matter how well-presented) became obsolete. Nowadays the term "Wide World of Sports" is used by ABC announcers to describe their weekend sports programming (such as the 2006 World Cup), but the show itself, with its famous promise to show viewers "the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat" is no longer a part of Saturday afternoon television.

moreless Sports: Local TV eliminating some sports reports Local TV eliminating some sports reports WTSP is the latest to cut regular segments out of 5 and 5:30 newscasts. DEGGANS By ERIC DEGGANS © St. Petersburg Times, published April 27, 2000 WTSP-Ch. 10 has discontinued regularly scheduled sports reports in its 5 and 5:30 p.m. newscasts, continuing a trend that experts say is affecting local TV newscasts nationwide. As fans find more scores, updates and highlights on all-sports cable channels, Internet sites and sports radio stations, local TV news directors see less need for sports reports, particularly in early evening newscasts dominated by female viewers. That's what prompted news director Jim Church to remove the 31/2 minutes of sports that aired in WTSP's 5 and 5:30 newscasts each weekday, starting Wednesday. Important sports stories, such as the Devil Rays' signing of Dwight Gooden, still may be featured in early evening broadcasts as news stories, Church said. But on average days, fans will have to wait until the 6 p.m. newscast for regular coverage.

"The audience at that time is heavily female, and there's not as much interest among female viewers for sports," said Church, who stressed that no employees in the CBS affiliate's sports department would lose their jobs over the reduced air time. "We have the same commitment to sports as we've ever had," he said. "It's not where we air sports (that is important), it's that when we do air it, we do a good job." Sports director Al Keck, who has worked at the station since 1988, declined to comment. Chris Thomas, sports anchor at rival WFLA-Ch. 8, said he has endured similar reductions at the NBC affiliate, which stopped airing sports reports in its 5 and 5:30 newscasts in January, not long after the retirement of longtime sports director Dick Crippen. "For a traditionalist like me, it's very difficult," said Thomas, who gets less than 21/2 minutes of air time at 6 p.m. and 31/2 minutes at 11 each weekday.

"We'll get phone calls and letter saying, "You didn't have this' or "You didn't have that.' Well, with a four-man sports department, there's only so much you can do." The cutbacks may sound unusual given the number of sports organizations the Tampa Bay area supports. But none of the area's TV news outlets now features a regular sports report in its 5 or 5:30 newscasts, though ABC affiliate WFTS-Ch. 28 airs a specialized sports segment in its 5:30 p.m. broadcast. "Our research shows, typically, that 25 percent of our viewers absolutely have to have (sports reports), another 25 percent could take it or leave it, and 40 percent couldn't care less," said Dan Bradley, vice president of news at WFLA. "So you don't want to do anything that chases away half the audience (wanting sports).

But you also don't want to spend too much time on something your audience could care less about." Consultant Ron Bilek, a former news director at TV stations in Orlando, Cleveland and Atlanta, among other places, said that too many TV sports reporters do little besides present scores and video highlights of games taken from satellite feeds. "Are viewers finding out about things before they happen or when the sports guy goes to the press conference?" said Bilek, who also works as director of TV operations for the American City Business Journal Co., which owns the Tampa Bay Business Journal. "There's nobody doing sports stories of relevance. They're there to add lightness and entertainment." Elliott Wiser, general manager of Time Warner's local 24-hour cable news channel, Bay News 9, said TV has to present sports reports in a new way. So he developed a half-hour live show that mixes reports, live interviews and calls from viewers, called Sports Connection. "Sports is one of the last areas of TV where people do things the way they've always done them ... (and) you have to have a new approach," said Wiser, noting that Bay News 9 also features regular sports updates each hour from 6 to 11 p.m.

"That new approach shouldn't always be, "Let's cut sports.' " Church said WTSP's move will refocus the station's sports resources on newscasts that fans watch more regularly. "For the average viewer, there will probably be little change," he said. "Telling a story when nobody's listening to it is not a good use of air time." WIDE WORLD RETURNS: ABC is bringing back Wide World of Sports. The anthology show, which promised to bring viewers "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat" was canceled in 1997 after a record run of 37 seasons. ABC said it is planning to resurrect the show next year. The network is betting the show can survive in a much different television landscape from its heyday in the 1970s. Now such events as barrel jumping, motorcycle stunts and prize fights are on cable channels or more profitable pay-per-view television. ABC is even bringing back the former host, 77-year-old Jim McKay, to do a weekly essay on sports. "It's a real challenge," ABC Sports president Howard Katz said. "We've got one of the best-known brands in sports.

Now it's up to me to figure out how it can work." With the network spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to air pro football and golf, and with sports rights fees soaring, Katz has been looking for cheaper ways to attract viewers since he took over as head of ABC Sports 13 months ago. His search led him to Wide World of Sports, which as an anthology show is inexpensive to produce but can deliver big profits if a lot of people watch. During the peak of its popularity, the show was one of the network's highest rated and turned a profit of as much as $180-million a year. One analyst wonders whether the program can last more than a few weeks. "If they want to put on something that would get about a 1 rating, that's their business," said Larry Nordenstern, onetime director of sports marketing services for Omnicom Group Inc.'s BBDO advertising agency. "I applaud them for trying, but I don't see how it could work." Katz said he hasn't decided on the format but the show could include NCAA championship events, demolition derby and lumberjack events. -- Information from Bloomberg News was used in this report. © St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.

Headlines ESPN Classic - Roone Arledge, created Monday Night Football Roone Arledge, created Monday Night Football By Mike Meserole Special to ESPN.com Roone Arledge, the TV sports visionary who made "Monday Night Football" a national viewing habit, and turned the earnest but ancient Olympic Games into a worldwide television spectacular, died Thursday. He was 71. Roone Arledge created "Wide World of Sports" and "The American Sportsman" for ABC. In 38 years as the American Broadcasting Company's most prominent and successful executive, first as guiding light of the sports division and then as mastermind of ABC's rise to the top of network news, Arledge was credited with popularizing such original programs as "Monday Night Football," "Wide World of Sports," "The American Sportsman" and "Nightline", and coining expressions like "Up Close and Personal" and "The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat." He made household names of the well-traveled Jim McKay and the ill-tempered Howard Cosell, and later did the same for such news anchors as Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters and Ted Koppel.

He spent millions raiding other networks for major talent and hundreds of millions to keep those networks from taking major events from him. Life magazine listed Arledge among its "100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century" in 1990, the same year he was elected to the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Four years later, Sports Illustrated ranked him third, behind Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan, in its 40th anniversary issue, honoring the 40 most significant individuals in U.S. sports since SI was first published. Of the truckloads of sports and news Emmy awards won on his watch, the ones that meant the most to him were the 29 earned covering the 1972 Munich Olympics and the kidnapping of 11 Israeli team members by Palestinian terrorists.

That coverage "changed television itself," according to authors Marc Gunther and Bill Carter in their book "Monday Night Mayhem": "From then on whenever a catastrophe struck, viewers no longer were content to wait for film at eleven; they expected television to afford them a chance to be eyewitnesses to history." Roone Pinckney Arledge II was born in New York on July 8, 1931, and grew up on Long Island, more a serious follower of sports than a star participant. He had no trouble, however, going for the gold off the field, particularly at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1952 as president of his class, president of his fraternity and editor of the yearbook. Arledge came into the world the same year Thomas Edison died and shared with America's greatest inventor a genius for innovation, industrial management and self-promotion that few had ever seen before, at least not in the wide-open early days of television sports. After a two-year hitch in the army, where he produced radio programs at the Aberdeen proving ground in Maryland, he took a job with NBC-TV's New York affiliate.

Production talent was so scarce back then that when ABC acquired the rights to televise NCAA football in 1960, sports packager Edgar Scherick, who was running the nascent sports department, hired Arledge, a 28-year-old whose five-year resume included a regional Emmy for producing a morning puppet show. "When I got into it in 1960," said Arledge, "televising sports amounted to going out on the road, opening three or four cameras and trying not to blow any plays. They were barely documenting the game, but nobody cared because the marvel of seeing a picture was enough to keep people glued to their sets." Soon after arriving at ABC, Arledge sent a memorandum to his new bosses, laying out his plan to break with the tradition of "bringing the game to the viewer" and concentrate instead on "bringing the viewer to the game." The memo promised to "utilize every production technique that has been learned in producing variety shows, in covering political conventions, and in shooting travel and adventure series." It went on to say, "we will have cameras mounted on jeeps, on mike booms, in risers on helicopters, anything necessary.

In short, we are going to add show business to sports!" Like Edison's invention factory at Menlo Park in the late 1800s, Arledge's shop of free-wheeling innovators came up with one novel gadget after another to make whatever event ABC Sports was covering seem more interesting on television than it was in person. Instant replays, slow motion, freeze-frame, split screen, field microphones, hand-held cameras, end zone cameras, cameras in blimps, on cranes, under water; many were called gimmicks when they first appeared, but all have long since become production staples. That technology, combined with a scene-setting story line, bold graphics, lots of crowd shots and close-ups of everyone from angry coaches to nervous mothers to face-painted drunks, gave ABC events a unique look and feel. And at the center of it all was Arledge. "Roone was great in his total control of the whole situation," said former ABC network president Tom Moore in Bert Randolph Sugar's "The Thrill of Victory: The Inside Story of ABC Sports".

"He did it all, the acquiring of the rights, the administration of the office, the hiring of the personnel, the packaging of the product, the delivery of the product, the scheduling and promotion. But his greatest asset, which very few people know, is people. He's got the goddamnedest troop of people over there you've ever seen!" With the sun at ABC rising and setting on Arledge, most staffers, like right-hand man Chuck Howard, never got the credit they deserved. Others, like proteges Don Ohlmeyer and Dick Ebersol, had to strike out on their own to get recognized. Nevertheless, from 1960 to 1986, Arledge's army was the best production team in television, beginning with the debut of "Wide World of Sports" on April 21, 1961. “ He did it all, the acquiring of the rights, the administration of the office, the hiring of the personnel, the packaging of the product, the delivery of the product, the scheduling and promotion. But his greatest asset, which very few people know, is people. He's got the goddamnedest troop of people over there you've ever seen!

” — former ABC network president Tom Moore on Roone Arledge According to Pulitzer Prize winning TV critic Ron Powers, "Wide World of Sports" quickly "established a truth that had never been tested before: that instead of telecasting events because people were already interested in them (the World Series, the Rose Bowl), clever programmers could make people interested in events because they were on television." From track meets and cliff diving to sumo wrestling and barrel jumping, Wide World consistently lived up to its signature opening, a promise most young viewers could recite from memory better than the preamble of the Constitution. As first written by Arledge on the back of an airline ticket and recited excitedly by host Jim McKay, it went: "Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport: The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, the human drama of athletic competition. This is ABC's "Wide World of Sports!" Wide World was Ed Scherick's idea. He thought it up, negotiated the early rights contracts and sold the advertising. He then handed the ball to Arledge, who ran with it and never looked back.

Forty years later, talking to Richard Sandomir of The New York Times, Scherick credited Arledge with making the show a success but not with devising the concept. "Roone had nothing to do with the formation of Wide World," said his old mentor. Jim Spence, a former senior vice president of ABC Sports told Sandomir: "Roone executed [the show], but he didn't create it. I think Ed's complaint has been that while Roone didn't take credit for creating it, he didn't deny it when someone else said he did." Within three years of Wide World's debut, ABC was covering its first Olympics, the Winter Games at Innsbruck, and even though the United States won only one gold medal, Arledge fell in love with the production possibilities of the quadrennial pageant. Over the seven Olympic cycles from 1964 to 1988, ABC would carry 10 of the 14 winter and summer games and escalate its coverage from 17� hours at Innsbruck in '64 to 180 hours at Los Angeles 20 years later.

Rights fees also skyrocketed from $597,000 for Innsbruck to over 500 times that much ($309 million) for Calgary in 1988. ABC's Olympic broadcasts focused on track and field, gymnastics and figure skating to lure women and casual sports fans into the tent, and were sprinkled with a steady stream of Up Close and Personals, the two-minute profiles of medal hopefuls who were more often than not Americans. But there was still plenty of air time for the unexpected, like Franz Klammer's wild, gold-medal ride in the downhill at Innsbruck in 1976, the U.S. hockey team upsetting the Russians in 1980 and, of course, the tragedy at Munich in 1972. In 1969, the year after ABC had carried both the winter and summer Olympics for the first time, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle approached Arledge about a Monday night game of the week. CBS and NBC had already turned down Rozelle, citing their well-established prime time line-ups, but ABC was a ratings wasteland on Monday nights.

Arledge paid a hefty $25.5 million for the three-year, 39-game package, but it was easily the best buy of his career. Another good move was pairing the caustic Cosell with country quarterback Don Meredith as color commentators. Much has been made of Arledge's refusal to ever give the NFL or any other league veto power over ABC announcers, but the fact is that Rozelle respected Cosell as a journalist and didn't mind his presence in the booth. The rest is broadcasting history. Within a year MNF had a weekly audience of nearly 30 million and would become the longest running prime time show in television history. And by the show's eighth season, a TV Guide poll revealed that Cosell was the most-liked and most-hated sportscaster in the country. America's favorite blowhard also figured in the only out-and-out failure of Arledge's career--"Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell," a 1975 attempt to reprise the old "Ed Sullivan Show" that folded in 18 weeks. Arledge, who had been named president of ABC Sports in 1968, was appointed president of ABC News as well in 1977.

Despite a less than warm welcome to the club ("People in news were outraged that I hadn't been a reporter or worked my up"), he went about building the perennial No. 3 network news division into a winner. First he broke up the disastrous evening news anchor team of Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters, brought back Peter Jennings as one of three new anchors and renamed the show "World News Tonight." He also launched a pair of newsmagazines, "20/20" and "PrimeTime Live"; beefed up his stable of reporters by raiding CBS for veterans Jeff Greenfield, John Laurence, Richard Roth and Morton Dean, among others; stole the redoubtable David Brinkley from NBC and gave him a Sunday morning talk show called "This Week"; and at 11:30 p.m., where no news program had ever prospered before, he created "America Held Hostage" in 1980 with Ted Koppel reporting on the Iranian hostage crisis every night for 15 minutes to a half hour.

When the crisis ended a year later, Koppel, the show and its one-story-a-night format remained as "Nightline." Back in the '60's Arledge and Tom Moore drew up a list of 15 events they wanted to secure the rights to so that ABC would be the unquestioned leader in worldwide TV sports. Since then, ABC has covered just about all of them--the Olympics, the World Series, the Super Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, the World Cup, the U.S. and British Opens, the Indianapolis 500, Wimbledon, heavyweight championship fights, and the Tour de France, among others. One of the few events they missed was the Masters; a cozy relationship among Augusta National, Cadillac, Travelers Insurance and CBS has always prevented any other network from making a pitch for the tournament. Too bad. Getting the notoriously protective Cliff Roberts to take ABC's money and allow Cosell inside the gates would have been the supreme test of Arledge's legendary negotiating skills.

Roone Arledge, 71, a Force In TV Sports and News, Dies - The New York Times The New York Times Business Day |Roone Arledge, 71, a Force In TV Sports and News, Dies Search Roone Arledge, the television industry executive and producer whose creativity, leadership and technical innovations revolutionized the presentation of both news and sports, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 71. The cause was complications from cancer, said ABC, his professional home for decades. Mr. Arledge, who served first as president of ABC Sports and then as president and chairman of ABC News, was the most important behind-the-scenes figure in the television coverage of the major events of the last half century, from the Olympics to the boxing matches of Muhammad Ali in the 1960's to the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80. During the first half of his career, Mr. Arledge built ABC Sports into the most important division of that network.

One of his most significant achievements was leading sports programming out of the limited window of weekend television and into the prime-time hours, which he did first with the Olympics from Mexico City in 1968 and then with ''Monday Night Football'' in 1970. The latter move had an enormous effect on the future of American sports. It paved the way for sports events of all kinds to be moved into prime time. The year after ''Monday Night Football'' became a success, baseball moved one game of the World Series into the night hours. In that sport's entire previous history, all the games had been played during the day. Only a few years later all the World Series games were at night as networks recognized the opportunity to get more viewers and advertising revenue. Continue reading the main story Dick Ebersol, one of many protégés of Mr. Arledge who went on to prominence in television, ultimately as chairman of NBC Sports, said, ''Roone was surely the only television executive of his time who would have dared to put sports in prime time.'' In so doing, Mr. Ebersol said, Mr. Arledge opened the door to the entire era of sports as big business.

''All of the money the athletes are making, all the big money in sports, none of that would be happening if not for Roone,'' Mr. Ebersol said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Nowhere was his leadership more influential than in the transformation of the Olympics from an event of minimal interest to the most potent programming of any kind on television. When Mr. Arledge acquired his first Olympics for ABC -- the 1964 Winter Games from Innsbruck, Austria -- he paid $200,000 for the American television rights. NBC paid $545 million for the rights to the 2002 games in Salt Lake City. Mr. Arledge had a similar impact on television news. When he gained control of ABC News in 1977, it was performing poorly and was lightly regarded in the industry. By the late 1980's it was the dominant news department in television. Mr.

Arledge created or popularized a long roster of the most successful and critically acclaimed television shows of the last generation, including ''Wide World of Sports'' and ''Monday Night Football'' in sports and ''World News Tonight,'' ''20/20'' and ''Nightline'' after he shifted to news. All those programs are two decades old or more and are still televised. A Lifetime-Achievement Emmy During a ceremony in September, when Mr. Arledge was awarded the first lifetime- achievement Emmy Award, his 37th Emmy over all, Don Hewitt, the creator of the CBS News program ''60 Minutes,'' said, ''Just about everything that's good in television has a Roone Arledge trademark on it.'' An avid believer in the power of a star system in drawing and holding television audiences, Mr. Arledge established or fostered the careers of many of the most familiar television names of the last four decades, including Jim McKay, Frank Gifford and Howard Cosell in sports and Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer and Ted Koppel in news. Ms. Sawyer said Mr. Arledge had a special talent for handling the egos of the stars he made.

''The art of managing anchor monsters is a very refined one, and Roone was a past master,'' she said. Unlike almost every television executive who preceded him and most who work in the industry today, Mr. Arledge's true home was not in the executive suite but rather behind a console of monitors inside a broadcasting truck. ''The image that ultimately appears on the tube is what TV is all about,'' Mr. Arledge said. ''So for me the most rewarding and exciting part of my job is making pictures and words that move people.'' That talent was never more in evidence than during the 1972 Olympic Games from Munich, when ABC Sports, led by Mr. Arledge, was forced to shift from covering the games to bringing to the world the most dramatic news story of that year -- the invasion of the Olympic Village by Arab terrorists, who took 11 Israeli athletes hostage. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Arledge supervised ABC's coverage over the next 17 hours, right through the announcement that all the hostages had been killed. ABC was the only news outlet in the world with close access to the unfolding events. Mr. Arledge later told Marc Gunther for his 1994 biography of Mr.

Arledge, ''The House That Roone Built,'' that as he monitored the story from the ABC control room he remembered that in 1963 NBC had been the only network with a live camera in the Dallas police headquarters when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. He made up his mind to stay with the story live until it ended. ''The cardinal error is to be there with the only live camera and then miss whatever might happen,'' he said. ABC, Mr. McKay, and especially Mr. Arledge were showered with praise for their work in Munich, which won a never-matched total of 29 Emmy Awards for both news and sports coverage. Although he continued to lead ABC Sports, it was the events in Munich that first led Mr. Arledge to believe he could expand his vision to include the far more challenging and serious world of news. A Hunger for Facts Mr. Arledge had been raised to be a serious man. Born July 8, 1931, in Forest Hills, Queens, Roone Pinckney Arledge Jr. grew up in Merrick, on Long Island, in a family consumed by the events of the day, which were transmitted into the Arledge home by radio.

His father, a lawyer for Equitable Life Assurance, led discussions about developments in World War II around the family dinner table, instilling in his son a lifelong hunger for facts and information. His mother, Gertrude, pressed him to excel, which he did both academically and in every other pursuit in his school days. Mr. Arledge attended Columbia University, beginning in 1949, and came under the influence of some of the outstanding faculty in the English department, notably Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. Two of the signature touches that Mr. Arledge brought to the programs he later produced he learned in these courses: the importance of narrative and the role of the hero. Years later the announcers of ABC Sports were taught to emphasize what Mr. Arledge called the story line of whatever game they were covering and to focus on a star whose personal story could transcend the outcome of the events itself. The 'up close and personal' biography of an athlete, which ABC's Olympic coverage invented to introduce viewers to obscure foreign athletes, became the template for personalizing the stories of stars in every sport.

''So much of what Roone did from 'Wide World of Sports' to the Olympics to 'Monday Night Football' was about the storytelling,'' said Don Ohlmeyer, another of Mr. Arledge's protégés who went on to run NBC's entertainment division. Athletes once obscure to Americans, like the skier Franz Klammer and the gymnast Olga Korbut, became magazine-cover celebrities after they received the up-close-and-personal treatment during Olympic coverage staged by Mr. Arledge. After college, Mr. Arledge landed a short-lived job at the Dumont network in 1952. After that network failed, he did a stint in the Army, returning to television in 1955 when he moved to Channel 4 in New York. There he got his first assignment as a producer -- for a puppet show. The star was Shari Lewis and in 1959 Mr. Arledge managed to win his first Emmy for his work. Advertisement Continue reading the main story By this time Mr.

Arledge had married his first wife, Joan Heise, a marriage that ended in divorce shortly after he left her alone on a planned Hawaiian vacation while he produced an Arkansas-Texas football game in 1971. It was the first of three marriages. He married Ann Fowler, a former Miss Alabama, in 1976. They divorced in 1984. Mr. Arledge married Gigi Shaw in 1994. He is survived by her and his four children from his first marriage, Roone, Elizabeth, Susan Weston and Patricia Looney. In the mid-1950's the first Mrs. Arledge was, fortuitously, working as a secretary to David Sarnoff, the head of NBC. Thanks to that connection, Mr. Arledge, collaborating with a friend from Columbia, Lawrence Grossman, later the president of both PBS and NBC News, was able to get a proposal for a program onto the desk of Sylvester Weaver, NBC's president and the creator of the ''Today'' show. That program, called ''Masterpiece,'' aimed to dramatize stories from the world of high art, like the creation of the Sistine Chapel. It was rejected.

So was his next, far less grandiose idea, ''For Men Only,'' a mix of jazz and man-talk modeled after Playboy magazine. But the failure of ''For Men Only'' proved to be a turning point. The program was spotted by an executive named Edgar J. Scherick, who was running the sports arm of the fledgling ABC television network. Mr. Scherick thought the show had a spark of originality and inquired about who had produced it. The inquiry led to a meeting at which Mr. Scherick asked the young producer if he knew anything about sports. He did. The young Mr. Arledge was able to identify every picture of every athlete on Mr. Scherick's office wall. He was hired. In April 1960, Mr. Arledge became an assistant on a new package of college football games that Mr. Scherick had acquired for ABC. Mr. Scherick had no way of realizing at that time exactly how ideally he had matched man and milieu. Putting the Camera in Motion Sports television at that time consisted of little more than a fixed camera recording events from afar. No imagination or style had been invested on what networks considered the toy department of their business.

That changed when Mr. Arledge took command of college football on ABC. Before his first season began he composed a memorandum, whose prescience proved to be startling. After describing a host of production techniques that would be brought to coverage of the games, including cameras on jeeps, hand-held cameras, boom microphones for sound, and even the use of helicopters, Mr. Arledge effectively summed up his philosophy, one that would ultimately transform television. ''In short, we are going to add show business to sports,'' he said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story In an interview with Sports Illustrated in 1966, Mr. Arledge said: ''What we set out to do was get the audience involved emotionally. If they didn't give a damn about the game, they might still enjoy the program.'' The program that allowed Mr. Arledge to put his defining stamp on the entire range of global sports was a weekly production of a collection of events, some as conventional as the Indianapolis 500, some as odd as Irish hurling, that he created with Mr. Scherick in 1961: ''ABC's Wide World of Sports.'' With Mr.

McKay as host, the show filled a latent hunger for sports in an entire generation of viewers by ''spanning the globe'' in the phrase that Mr. Arledge and Mr. McKay came up with, to bring viewers ''the human drama of athletic competition: the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.'' Under Mr. Arledge, ABC dominated television sports for the next two decades. In the turbulent 1960's the network developed a close association with Mr. Ali, both in his battles in the ring and also in his legal fight to regain the heavyweight title stripped from him after his refusal to accept induction in the Armed Forces. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy Some of Mr. Ali's most memorable moments on television came in ''Wide World of Sports'' interviews, in which he jousted with Mr. Cosell. Mr. Cosell became one of Mr. Ali's few defenders in the sports world and Mr. Arledge permitted Mr. Cosell, a lawyer by training, to express his conviction that Mr. Ali had been treated unlawfully. Mr. Cosell owed his career to Mr.

Arledge, who ignored a torrent of opposition against the announcer, some from within his own network. Before Mr. Arledge came to sports television, networks always permitted the leagues they covered to approve their announcers. Mr. Arledge pointedly refused to abide by that rule; he and he alone would select ABC's announcers. Mr. Cosell was the main beneficiary of that stand. But it was his presence on ''Monday Night Football'' that elevated Mr. Cosell to the status of star. The show became a national phenomenon, and the team of Mr. Cosell, Frank Gifford and Don Meredith became the most celebrated announcing crew in the history of American sports. The program itself was the defining validation of the Arledge sports credo: the game was no longer the thing; the show was the thing. Mr. Arledge began adding every major sports event he could acquire: the Triple Crown horse races; baseball on Monday nights; three of the four grand slam golf tournaments; N.B.A.

basketball; even big-game hunting in the outdoors show he invented, ''The American Sportsman.'' In every case, he pushed ABC's engineering department to add more technical innovations: instant replays, isolated replays, slow-motion replays, cameras in race cars, cameras on skiers' helmets, microphones on fresh kill being devoured by a lion. As a manager, Mr. Arledge was loose in style but in total control in practice. He put off innumerable decisions, before flying into action to solve everything all at once. He installed special red phones in every broadcast truck -- known as Roone phones -- which allowed him to call in instructions during every game. He quickly showed an avid interest in receiving credit for everything ABC Sports put on television -- each ABC sports show ended with the same mantra: ''The executive producer of ABC Sports is Roone Arledge.'' Some, including Mr. Scherick, bristled at what they perceived as credit-grabbing, and Mr. Arledge did display a lifelong, somewhat inexplicable tendency toward embellishing his already towering achievements. Advertisement Continue reading the main story ABC Sports developed a swagger to it that emanated from the force of Mr. Arledge's increasingly larger-than-life personality.

He forswore suits for safari jackets, let his carrot-orange hair go long, wore aviator glasses and big jewelry. Though in many ways a shy man in social settings, Mr. Arledge mixed frequently with celebrities from the worlds of politics, finance, sports and art. He often exasperated his staff with his unpredictable habits, sometimes being out of touch for hours or even days only to show up in a production truck right before kick-off. He developed an enduring aversion to returning phone calls, a trait that served only to increase the value of his in-person time. Staff members who complained about never hearing from him would become charmed whenever he turned his attention to them. ''After not being able to get your calls returned, you'd meet him for lunch and he'd give you four hours,'' Ms. Walters said. Eventually, however, Mr. Arledge grew restless in sports. His production of two Olympics in 1976, from Innsbruck and Montreal, helped elevate ABC to the top of the network ratings race for the first time in its history. A stab at expanding into entertainment with a variety show starring Mr. Cosell failed in 1975.

He told The Daily News in the fall of 1976, ''I would much rather have it on my tombstone that I did something important.'' One Man in Two Demanding Jobs Mr. Arledge prevailed on ABC's management to let him run the network's troubled news division in 1977. In a first -- and last -- for the television industry, he continued to lead ABC Sports as well. But his achievements in sports meant little in the world of television news, the one place in network television where seriousness was sacrosanct. The reaction to Mr. Arledge's appointment ranged from skepticism to outright scorn. Time magazine suggested that the movie ''Network,'' about a television company without conscience, might be coming true. The headline in the article in The New York Times announcing Mr. Arledge's appointment read: ''Arledge Will Head ABC News: Disclaims Theatrical Flourishes.'' Inside ABC News, the situation was, if anything, worse. ''Our reaction when Roone came in was hostility, suspicion,'' Ted Koppel said in 1989. ''We saw Roone as something of an interloper.'' The reaction stunned Mr. Arledge, who believed he had proved himself in sports.

''I felt that my whole emphasis had been to elevate it,'' he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992. ''Getting rid of announcer approval, introducing journalism to it.'' Mr. Arledge threw himself into news as he had into sports, spending lavishly to bring in new correspondents, anchors and producers, creating new programs. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Arledge engaged in several personal campaigns to rebuild ABC News around an identifiable star. He first pursued Dan Rather of CBS, who was tempted by the force of Mr. Arledge's personality to jump networks. The wooing forced CBS to offer Mr. Rather its anchor job and to ask Walter Cronkite to step down six months early. After losing out on Mr. Rather, Mr. Arledge tried unsuccessfully to lure Tom Brokaw from NBC News. Those efforts, along with a later successful wooing of Diane Sawyer away from CBS, set off an escalation in the salaries of television's biggest news stars, which took the pay of a network anchor from about $650,000 for Walter Cronkite in 1980 to about $10 million for network anchors today.

The ''60 Minutes'' correspondent Mike Wallace often said, ''Roone freed the slaves.'' Without a star anchor to build around, Mr. Arledge emulated his ''Monday Night Football'' approach and went instead with three. He renamed ABC's newscast ''World News Tonight'' and put Frank Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson in Chicago and Mr. Jennings in London. After a slow start, the show began to build a following. Mr. Arledge said to colleagues at the time that all he needed to break through was a big story. He found it in the fall of 1979, when a group of militant students seized the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran. Moving faster than the other networks, ABC got a correspondent, Bob Dyk, to the site, and for days had exclusive pictures of the unfolding events. But it was about 10 days later that Mr. Arledge seized control of the opportunity the situation presented. Struck by how many people in life, from his elevator man to people on the street, wanted to know everything they could about the events in Iran, he persuaded ABC's management to give him time to produce a news special every night at 11:30 on the crisis.

Titled ''America Held Hostage,'' the program became a breakthrough for television news. Mr. Arledge had carved out a new beachhead, 30 minutes extra every night for his news division. When the Iran crisis ended more than 400 nights later, Mr. Arledge had his second program established, as well as a new star in the show's anchor, Mr. Koppel, whose skills in international reporting had found an outlet. Renamed ''Nightline,'' it went on to become one of the most critically praised programs in the history of television news. ''I'm prouder of that show than of almost anything I've ever done,'' Mr. Arledge said in a Newsweek interview. Mr. Arledge also created ABC's first newsmagazine, ''20/20,'' and made it a success after an infamously stumbling start, finding a home for another of ABC's news stars, Ms. Walters. Convinced that the traditional Sunday morning political talk show format was stale, he scrapped ''Issues and Answers'' and in 1981 instituted a new format built around his latest recruit, David Brinkley, the longtime NBC anchor. The new program quickly assumed leadership on Sundays.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story Finding the Profit in News Another change wrought by Mr. Arledge was in the expectation that a network news division could never turn a profit. Previously news divisions had been acceptable loss leaders for networks. But Mr. Arledge, with his expanding roster of successful programs, made money with ABC News, about $70 million a year by 1990, and the divisions at other networks were soon asked to do the same. Still, his success did not entirely protect him. When Capital Cities Communications bought ABC from its founder and owner Leonard Goldenson in 1985, a round of cost-cutting began, curbing Mr. Arledge's free-rein style. More significantly, the new management removed Mr. Arledge from his 25-year leadership of ABC Sports, which was then suffering financial losses. Mr. Arledge recovered from that blow to lead ABC News into its greatest period of prominence. By the start of the 1990's a new newsmagazine, ''Prime Time Live,'' had overcome another rocky start to become established as a second valuable entry on ABC's prime-time lineup and ''World News Tonight,'' anchored solely by Peter Jennings, was the top-rated newscast.

''Nightline'' remained the most prestigious news show in television. The success began to ebb in the mid-90's. Mr. Arledge's prerogatives were more and more challenged by the Capital Cities management. He suffered a number of reverses in his health, beginning with prostate cancer. He began to withdraw from day-to-day control of the division. After the Walt Disney Company acquired ABC in 1996, Mr. Arledge stepped back further. In 1998, the company appointed David Westin president of the division, with Mr. Arledge as chairman, functioning mainly in a consulting role. His contact with former colleagues in news and sports became sporadic, but always charmingly idiosyncratic. After not hearing from him for years, Mr. McKay got a call at midnight the first night of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the first time the Games were being covered by NBC, not ABC. Mr. McKay recalled that Mr. Arledge wanted to analyze NBC's coverage. ''The first thing he said was: 'You know what's missing? You.' He asked if we could talk every few nights about what was happening on NBC.

Then, of course, he never called back,'' Mr. McKay said. But Mr. Arledge's imprint on the division, as well as all of the news and sports industry remained undimmed. ''He was always seeing just beyond the horizon,'' Ms. Sawyer said. ''You always felt if you could just follow his gaze, you could stay ahead of everyone.'' Mr. McKay said Mr. Arledge's career achievements were ''huge and outsized, like the man himself.'' He added that they were also easy to sum up: ''He was the very best at what he did that there ever was.''

Question: What long running ABC sports program promised viewers 'the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat'?
Answer: The Wide World of Sports